I once was a “professional Christian.” Like David Ramsey, (who recently authored “What Could the Church Learn from Amazon?”), I also stepped away from the church, and I agree with him that part of the problem was “the pressures that…
‘Faith is relationship’ — truer now than it was almost five decades ago
A short sentence has echoed through my adult life, and it rings truer now than it did 46 years ago. “Faith is relationship,” Clint Dunagan told a room full of Hardin-Simmons University freshmen in the spring of 1976. We learned…
Four R’s for racial reckoning by the white church
“What does God need from white people now?” That’s the question our friend and brother, James Forbes, posed recently to a group of white ministers in the Alliance of Baptists. I was asked to give the first response. Stunned by…
Teens say social media deepens friendships. Some aren’t buying it.
If I have 1,100 people I am friends with on Facebook, how many of those friends do I really have relationships with?
Courageous conversations are no longer optional. It’s time to cross boundaries.
We’re going to have to do more, to move past talking (even preaching!) and into the messy and painful work of deep conversation held together by real relationship. In fact, it’s increasingly my conviction that this may be the heart of the faith community’s work in this moment: building authentic relationships upon which these difficult conversations can rest.